This issue seems to have arisen after upgrading from 22.04 to 24.04.
- When first logging in, Nautilus will open a folder in about 0.2-0.5 seconds, this is tolerable but still a lot slower than Thunar which is perceptually instantaneous (as it should be, my system is fast and uses SSDs).
- After opening Steam, it takes much longer to open a folder, particularly if there are "many" (100-1000) files, it may take 10-20 seconds to open a folder. Thunar is still instantaneous.
- browsing away from a folder and then back to it, still results in it taking 10 seconds to load, there has been no benefit from caching.
- Closing Steam will result in the time going back down to 0.2-0.5 seconds.
- After a while (maybe 10 minutes?) the slowdown seems to go away even with Steam remaining open.
- Exiting and reopening Steam will make the slowdown occur again, though it seems to recover more quickly, probably because Steam is doing less.
- I don't think the issue is specific to Steam, with Steam just being a large application that touches a lot of things. Also, I'm clearly not blaming Steam here, as Thunar remains instantaneous and Steam doesn't seem to impact any other applications.
Relevant System specs:
- Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS
- Intel Core i5-12400F CPU
- 32 GB ram
- SSDs
Things I have tried:
apt purge nautilus && apt install nautilus
Setting
ulimitmuch higher.Purging
~/.cachePurging anything I could find under
~/related to nautilus
Looking for errors in syslog - there's nothing.
Running Nautilus with debug messages. During the 10 seconds, it is doing stuff with thumbnails, like this but a lot longer:
(org.gnome.Nautilus:24053): nautilus-file-DEBUG: 11:36:24.060: Called file_get_icon(), at size 32
(org.gnome.Nautilus:24053): nautilus-file-DEBUG: 11:36:24.060: Returning thumbnailed image, at size 22 32
(org.gnome.Nautilus:24053): nautilus-file-DEBUG: 11:36:24.071: Called file_get_icon(), at size 32
(org.gnome.Nautilus:24053): nautilus-file-DEBUG: 11:36:24.077: Called file_get_icon(), at size 32
(org.gnome.Nautilus:24053): nautilus-file-DEBUG: 11:36:24.077: Returning thumbnailed image, at size 30 32
(org.gnome.Nautilus:24053): nautilus-file-DEBUG: 11:36:24.093: Called file_get_icon(), at size 32
(org.gnome.Nautilus:24053): nautilus-file-DEBUG: 11:36:24.104: Called file_get_icon(), at size 32
The log doesn't show anything else happening during the 10 seconds other than thumbnail related stuff.
Possible solutions:
For me an obvious solution is to just use Thunar, even though I'm used to Nautilus.
However considering this is a fairly reproducible on my system, I'd be interested in trying to debug it further.
Edit: Subsequently I have upgraded to newer versions of Ubuntu and no longer have the issue in 25.04, as such I'm unable to verify a fix or that the issue still exists in 24.04.
